Human rights engagement – view from Friends Provident
Friends Provident has been managing socially responsible investment funds for 15 years, making it Europe’s oldest and biggest provider of such funds. Today, through its asset management subsidiary, Friends, Ivory and Sime, Friends Provident manages £2 billion in its ethical funds.

Traditionally socially responsible investment has tended to avoid investing in companies facing human rights challenges (as well as a range of other ‘ethical’ issues). Friends Provident is now trying to develop a more constructive approach by ‘engaging’ with companies in which it invests that are facing such challenges, and to work with them to encourage good practice.

Friends Provident believes that addressing and managing human rights issues is increasingly becoming an essential element of good business practice, especially for multinational companies. These companies can face a number of significant business risks when they operate in countries with poor human rights records – which have the potential to damage the company’s financial performance.

For companies in which Friends Provident invests, the goals of the human rights engagement programme are to:

  • work with those companies to identify ways in which they might protect or enhance their reputation and shareholder value through good management of human rights issues
  • encourage those companies to publish and uphold strong human rights policies

More generally, Friends Provident is keen to contribute to the debate around human rights and corporate responsibility by raising the issue’s profile in the business community. To this end, Friends Provident is collaborating with several leading organisations in developing the engagement programme, including the Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum, New Economics Foundation, Ashridge Centre for Business and Society and Amnesty International UK.
Source: Rachel Crossley, Ethics Policy Analyst, Friends Provident, London, UK

 

The above material is extracted from chapter 4.1 ("Shareholder pressure") of: 

Human rights -- is it any of your business?  

Amnesty International UK Business Group / Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum [now International Business Leaders Forum], Apr. 2000, p. 71.

© April 2000 Amnesty International UK and The Prince of Wales Business Leaders Forum